Playing Catch-Up

Since I was so uncomplimentary about the scenery at the start of Dragonflight last time, I thought it only fair I give some praise where it's due. Yesterday I finally got back to playing again (So much for the Winds of Mysterious Fortune - I really dropped the ball on that one...) and after I'd cleared up a couple more quests, the breadcrumb trail took me over the hill and out of the grey-red-black hellscape into a beautiful, lush valley.

Why they wouldn't start with somewhere this lovely I have no idea. Or, wait, yes I do. Someone at Blizzard either has an emotional age of about twelve or thirteen or believes most WoW players do. That'll be it. Also I bet they all listen to some stripe of metal. In the office, likely as not. They all think red and black is cool. 

Okay, red and black is cool. But only in clothes, not in landscapes. Glad we got that cleared up, at least. 

In contrast to what happened the first time I arrived in the Dragon Isles, when I took no screenshots at all, this time I took...  hang on, wait a moment while I count them... eighteen. Could have been a lot more, too.

That was this morning but I got to the new area last night, so why the wait? Ah, well that makes a very nice example of why veterans and developers don't always remember what things are like for a new player. Or a returning player. Or someone who just plain doesn't know what they're doing. You can guess where I fit in.

Here's what happened. I got the quest from the over-enthusiastic but inexperienced dragon cadet outside the Embassy (Nice bit of characterization there.). She'd been deputed by the Majordomo to take me to the camp where there'd been some trouble with some ancestral enemy of the dragons. They'd (Conveniently or inconveniently, depending which way you look at it.) just woken up from... I don't know, hibernation? Stasis? Deep meditation? They hadn't been seen for a long time, anyway, but now they were back.

Before I get to the next part, I have to ask. Why? I mean, why a Majordomo? It's an obscure choice of rank, isn't it? There's an option to have him explain what it means , which I already knew, which was why I wanted to ask him. My not-that-extensive experience of majordomos (Majordomi?)suggest it would be kinda weird to see one commanding an army in the field. More likely to find them organizing the help for a big party in the palace, I'd have thought.

His explanation didn't hold much water but maybe it's different for dragons. Whatever, he was there and he was giving... not so much orders as rather avuncular suggestions it felt like it would be unwise to ignore. So off I went with the cadet, who set off at a jog-trot towards a gap in the hills I hadn't even noticed.

And that was where the problem arose. I was on foot because I generally only mount up in games if I'm planning on going some distance, not if I'm walking (Or running, because it's always running in games, isn't it?) around town. I jogged along behind but the dragon was a lot taller than my vulpera (Isn't everyone? Okay, not gnomes.) and I fell further and further behind.

Waaaiiit! I only have little legs!

The cadet was yammering away to herself the whole way. She never stops monologuing. I was trying to read her speech bubbles although I think she was voice-acted as well. I thought about mounting up but I decided by the time I worked out how to do it she'd be completely out of sight.

Luckily she stopped at the brow of the hill to wax lyrical about something or other and I was able to catch her up. Then, just as I was about to follow her, she shot off and before I could get started she disappeared. I carried on down to the camp but no-one there would talk to me. The quest tracker still told me I needed to be following the cadet to the camp, even though I was already in it and she was nowhere to be seen.

I spent about five minutes looking all around for her. No luck. I figured I was either going to have to drop the quest and start again, if you can do that in WoW, or else go all the way back to the Embassy to see if she'd reset. It was getting late, though, so I decided to leave it til the morning and logged out.

That was last night. This morning I logged back in, hoping maybe the quest would have sorted itself out while I was asleep but it hadn't. I was obviously going to have to go back to where I started but before I did that I thought I'd better mount up so the whole thing didn't just happen all over again. 

And I could not remember how to do it. I must have summoned a mount in WOW scores of times. Hundreds, probably. I was convinced I'd always done it by clicking an icon on a hot bar. And I'm sure that's just what I have done in the past. Only before you can click an icon on a hot bar it has to be on one and as I mentioned last time, all my hot bars were cleansed while I was away.

Now, in retrospect I'm willing to concede that the permanent services hot bar that comes as part of the default UI does include a pretty obvious horseshoe, which should have been a clue. In my defense, it's really small and if you mouse over it it doesn't say anything about a mount. It says something about Collections.

So sue me but I don't think of my mounts first and foremost as something to be collected. I think of them as something to ride. I concede that collecting mounts in WoW is a thing. I've read enough blog posts where people talk about their collection of mounts. It's not, however, one of my things so I didn't make the connection.

What I did do was go through all the keybinds looking for one to summon a ride. There isn't one. Or if there is, it's not included in the in-game information. I also looked through my bags in case there was something in there I was supposed to click but that's not how it works in Azeroth. (How it does work, as in where all those mounts hang out when you're not using them, probably best not to think about.)

In the end I had to google it.  And that's why MMORPGs are so confusing and frustrating for people who aren't intimately familiar with them. Nothing is ever as simple and straightforward as the people who play every day and the people who design the content imagine.

Once I'd found my "Collection" of mounts and pulled one of the icons onto a hot bar, I was ready to carry on. I rode back to the last place I'd seen the cadet (She has a name. I just don't remember what it is. I think it was something like Sarsaparilla.) and there she was. I spoke to her and the whole thing started up again, except this time I was on my Felsteed (Which it occurs to me suddenly I shouldn't have at Level 13, should I?) so instead of struggling to keep up with her, I had to keep stopping so the cadet could catch up to me.

All of which I found quite entertaining and even more so when I finally got to the camp and picked up my next set of quests. I did a couple and then just went exploring. I took all those screenshots with no interruptions because the whole area seems to be remarkably quiet, not to say idyllic.

There's an abundance of curious and interesting wildlife but almost none of it is aggressive. Whole valleys seem to be entirely devoid of threat or danger of any kind. It looks like it would be an excellent place to build a spa hotel. Or to take a party of Playable Worlds devs so they could get an idea of what makes for a fun environment.

After about twenty minutes, I ended up on the coast. I could see the Horde zeppelin service pulling away in the distance so I trotted down the beach in that general direction and in no time ended up back where I'd started. I have made this observation before but it bears repeating: a lot of MMORPGs, WoW being no exception, are more fun when you stop acting like everybody's gofer and just wander off and do your own thing.

I do find it surprising that, in the midst of my current lack of enthusiasm for games in general, it's WoW I most feel drawn to but that's how it is. I was quite looking forward to playing today and I'm quite looking forward to playing some more. I think the very pointlessness of it all is part of the charm.

Lastly, I just wanted to thank Shintar, who left a comment on the previous post with a link to a reddit thread explaining how to free up some of the hard disk space the WoW patcher leaves stuffed with unnecessary clutter. I'm very bad at checking older posts for late comments so I only saw it today, when I opened that one to get the link.

At first, I thought the tip wasn't going to be of any help. I checked the relevant location as advised but the folders in question were measurable in mere megabytes. I was about to forget it, when I noticed there was a folder called "World of Warcraft" inside my "World of Warcraft" folder. 

That seemed weird so I had a good look at both of them and guess what? It was the whole dam' lot again. I had the entire installation, twice, on the same drive. I mean, I knew in the past I'd had multiple installations on different drives but this was a whole new way to waste space.

I deleted everything from the spare installation except the screenshots and that freed up almost 100GB. Then I logged back into WoW in case it might need to replace a few files but it worked perfectly. How that bonus client got there I have no idea but I'm happy to have the space back.

I'll just have to remember to keep an eye on things to make sure it doesn't come back. I certainly don't trust Blizzard to do its own housekeeping. 

Unrealistic Expectations

I've seen an awful lot of discontented posts about Blizzard and World of Warcraft lately. It's hard to avoid them. Even though I'm not currently playing WoW it remains, as it has been for the best part of a decade and a half, the big story in the genre just about all the time.

These days, of course, there isn't just the one World of Warcraft. Blizzard may never have produced a sequel but, perhaps without intending to, they've somehow managed to make it seem as though they have. As with Norrath and a growing number of imaginary worlds, there are multiple versions of Azeroth available now. 

With three distinct and different versions available it's quite possible, likely even, that some are doing better than others. Not everyone is going to be unhappy all the time. Even so, there seems to be a general sense of malaise around the franchise as a whole.

For much of this year it was Retail in the firing line. There seemed to be no end to the complaints and discussions over everything that was wrong with Shadowlands. I kept hearing how most of the mechanics and systems introduced by the expansion were flawed or Not Fun. Either Blizzard wasn't doing much of anything about it or whatever it was doing didn't seem to be working.

As Classic wound down and the countdown to Burning Crusade ramped up, there was a fair amount of excitement but also some apprehension. Choices needed to be made and not everyone seemed comfortable about them. In the event the launch did arrive with the anticipated rush of exhillaration, and yet in a matter of days I found myself reading more tales of woe. 

Players leveling Shamans felt ignored and neglected, left in the old world dust to fend for themselves as the leveling bubble rose through Outlands towards the cap. Then there was the inevitable guild drama over reduced raid sizes, benching and the usual internecine maneuverings guilds tend to foster.

With the advent of the latest patch (9.1 I think it is) there's been a tinge of optimism over in Retail. I've seen commentary suggesting notice has finally been taken of the general levels of disatisfaction. Attempts are being made to turn the ship. Even then, there's a sense that it might be too little or too late or both.

The release of the recent Carbot Animations video "This is World of Warcraft" seems to have ratchetted the anxious tension around the games up another notch. Wilhelm has an excellent post on that, as does Gnomecore. Their positions overlap in a number of interesting way, especially given the extreme difference of their in-game interests and experiences. Both seem to agree the problems, whatever they are, lie as much with players and their expectations as with developers and their intent.

Both the posts also generated some lengthy and thoughtful comments. I get the impression the current state of all flavors of World of Warcraft and of the company behind them is giving a lot of players pause for thought.

It is, of course, not just about the games. It's only a couple of years since decisions taken over what could or couldn't be said in a livestream gave Blizzard unwelcome prominence on non-gaming newsfeeds all over the world. That controversy, bright though it blazed, doesn't appear to have smoldered as long as some expected or maybe hoped. In the end it seems it's the gameplay that matters most; the gameplay and the friendships it sustains.

Or doesn't. And that seems to be the problem. One of the problems, anyway.

In a comment on Wilhelm's post, Shintar linked another WoW video. 

 

I watched it but, like the Carbot video, it didn't really connect with me on the kind of visceral level it seems to have reached almost all of the two thousand or so YouTube viewers who left anguished comments on the thread. It's not that I don't recognize the experiences, albeit from games other than WoW; it's more that I don't look back on those same experiences with the anything close to the kind of emotion I'm reading about.

Perhaps the main difference between the two videos is where the center of gravity sits. The Carbot appears to drill down into what Blizzard, as both creator and curator, first got right and then got so badly wrong. The Pint video, conversely, appears to place a question mark over the validity of the experience itself, leaving the viewer uncertain where the blame, if blame there's to be, might lie.

All of this dovetails neatly into a sequence of posts Wilhelm has been running concerning the unwillingness of mmoprg players, en masse, to accept or even recognize the practicalities of keeping these games alive. Put shortly, it takes money and players don't want to pay.

There's another, closely-related theme playing out elsewhere. It concerns the attitude of players to games developers in general. Kaylriene has an excellent post up about that. He takes a very reasoned and reasonable approach, assuming goodwill on the developers' side, but it's worth reading the very well-argued counterpoint by Jackie in the comment thread, which includes this telling assessment:

"I don’t believe the developers want to engage with the playerbase. They’re not interested in criticism even from the people who can articulate it. If they wanted to communicate they would. My perception is that it’s an inward looking culture rather than outward looking."

It jibes nicely with something I said in my own comment on the thread there, where I asked why it might be, if we accept the premise that games developers do care quite deeply about the quality of their work and its fitness for purpose, that "so many changes in so many games appear to work so badly for so many players".

It's a worrisome question, isn't it? Personally, I've always been skeptical about player involvement in games development. I don't necessarily accept that individual players know what they want and I certainly don't see much in the way of collective agreement. 

Even if players did know what they wanted and could band together to express their wishes coherently, though, wouldn't it feel even worse to know the developers were listening and did care, but were fundementally incapable of doing anything very effective about it? 

Devs aren't gods, after all. Not even gaming gods. On the same day I read Jackie's comment I read this heartfelt statement by a developer for whom I have a lot of time, CharlieX of SmokymonkeyS, creators of the wondeful (now, sadly, mothballed) Ninelives. Despite the idiosyncratic English the emotion comes through perfectly: 

"Sometimes a player tells me, you design your game to more difficult and annoying to prevent the player to get the achieve. Well, this is a wrong idea overall. Sadly, this mean the developer's intend is not going well, and it happens always. Sometimes I go to watch my game player's video and get sick every time I saw the player stuck, get lost, or failed caused by my design."

Just because you know what you want to do doesn't always mean you're able to do it.

So much for the developers' side of the table. Returning to the comments in the threads following both the YouTube videos I mentioned, the recurring, indeed overwhelming theme coming from the players seems to be one of heroically unrealistic expectations. 

Playing World of Warcraft has very definitely been a seminal experience for many. Almost a rite of passage. From comment after comment I get the sense that playing WoW marked a transition from solipsistic isolation to social engagement, at least for some. Some feel betrayed that Blizzard somehow took this away from them. Others seem bereft, almost guilty. They lost the way all on their own.

The Pint video is fascinating in the way it depicts a player who, after playing and then leaving the game, has clearly been able to ground themselves in a committed relationship and, by implication, in the web of adult responsibilities required to support their newfound social status. Even with that support structure firmly in place, however, it just takes a nudge of commercially-driven nostalgia to tip them back into longing for a fondly-remembered past.

Wilhelm has another great post up about what prerequisites an mmorpg developer might need to have in place before choosing to enter the nostalgia market. For most games I think the factors he lists would be sufficient. For World of Warcraft, though, I suspect there needed to be more to make it work.

WoW wasn't just a video game. It was a global phenomenon. Its players weren't necessarily like other mmorpg players, either then or now. A lot of people ended up playing WoW who hadn't played other, similar games before. The things they did there were different to other things they'd done, not just in degree but in essence. 

I'd be willing to bet that some of the people posting elegaic, emotional comments on the threads following these deeply nostalgic videos found social engagement and acceptance in Azeroth for perhaps the first time. In their memory the experience isn't just one of many, another social setting where friendships were forged then forgotten. It was an intense experience that changed them and for that they value it highly.

It's a theme not in any way unique to WoW or indeed to mmorpgs or even video games. I see it repeated over and over in comment threads that draw on any widely-shared experience, from childhood itself through musical trends to a college education to sports... Any moment in a life when everything just seems to fall into place. When people around you understand. When you find your tribe. When you belong.

It always fades. School breaks up. You graduate college. The bands you followed split up or find new directions that don't sound good any more. You don't get picked for the team because you can't run so fast or jump so high and anyway practice is on a weekend and there are things you need to do, more important things. Your guildmates stop logging in, even on raid nights. Life moves on, everything changes, nothing stays the same.

 

If you're hoping that long-lasting mmorpg you used to love is going to buck that trend and stay the same forever, you're in line for a disappointment. It's going to change along with everything else or else it's not going to be there or if it is then no-one will be playing any more. 

And if you believe a Classic server is a time machine to take you and your friends back ten years to when you were younger and freer and life was better, well, you might, if you're lucky, get to take a nice vacation in a well-managed resort version of a specific snapshot of that past. And then time will catch up with you once again and you'll be back where you started, only with more disappointment than you had before because one more fantasy turned out to be just that and nothing more.

Listening to the various voices, the ones that seem most sanguine, most satisfied, are those that recognize a game is after all a game. Not "just" a game. More than that. But not so much more it can stop time and bring back lost youth. The people still having fun in World of Warcraft, both Retail and Classic/TBC, seem to me to be those who aren't expecting it to change their lives, just entertain them for a while.

I suspect that, if developers concentrated a little harder on entertaining people and worried a little less on keeping them locked into a revenue cycle, both sides might stand a better chance of getting what it is they really want. The games might hold onto the interest of more people for longer if players felt more accepted and more at home.

It's a pipe dream, I know, but its one that quite a few people seem to share. A few years back the buzzwords around the genre seemed to be Classic and Retro and Social. Now, the mission statements of many of the plethora of new studios spinning up from splintering mmorpg majors all seem to echo the call for a more emotionally intelligent approach to making mmorpgs. It's not so much a case of turning back time as it is learning from the past.

Whether any of them will be able to turn good intentions into good games remains to be seen but I think we should probably give them the benefit of the doubt, for now at least. If they can pull it off they'll only be giving us what we say we want, after all. 

Whether we'll want it when we get it, though, that's a whole different question.

Dancing By The pool

Here's a little thing I forgot about World of Warcraft's free trial (aka Starter Edition): if you don't pay, you don't get to use the mail.

In a game with no shared bank facilities, where the normal means of passing items from one character to another on the same account is by posting them, that seems a little harsh. You'd have thought they might restrict mail to just your own characters. What harm could that do?

I found out the hard way when I logged my new Vulpera Hunter into Orgrimmar last night. Attentive readers may remember I'd prepped for the cancellation of my subscription by making several new characters and sending them thirty-slot bags and pocket money. 

It wasn't until I went to open my inventory that I remembered something. When I'd made the new fox I'd sent her the stuff but she'd never gotten around to taking it out of the mailbox. And now she can't. Bummer.

That was why I ended up playing my new Goblin Warlock instead. It was touch and go whether she'd have bags and gold either. I remembered that I had logged her in but I also recalled running around Kezan for so long, searching without success for the bank, that I'd given up and logged her out back where she'd started. 

I thought I'd better check whether she was in the same predicament. Luckily it turned out she'd at least collected her mail before leaving. Since she was out I thought I might as well play her. 

So I did. And it was fun. A lot of fun. Back in 2013 I described the Goblin starting zone as "a fascinating place... genuinely laugh-out-loud funny" and I see no reason to alter my opinion. I'm not absolutely sure I've played through all of WoW's starting zones but of all the ones I can remember Kezan is by far the most entertaining. 

In that post I also wrote "had I known I was going to be expelled from it so abruptly and terminally at around level five I would have taken a lot more trouble to explore it in depth", something I found myself thinking again last night. I did manage to spend a little more time poking around under the elevated highways, down in the slums where the poor folk live but I still think I need to make another goblin and go poke around some more. 

Here's the thing about WoW. It applies to a lot of mmorpgs, come to think of it. A huge amount of work goes into the starting zones and the character, personality and culture of the races that live in them. And then most of that work is just thrown away.

About the only races that seem to retain some measure of consistency are the ones designed as comic relief. Gnomes, goblins and talking rats, usually. (The Asura in Guild Wars 2 are a bizarre hybrid of all three). They're the short ones who speak funny and make ridiculous machines that frequently blow up in their faces. That seems to be a joke that never grows old for developers. 

All the other races, no matter how different they start out, tend to clump up into one heroic (or villainous) blur as they diasporate around the world. (Yeah, that's not a word. Just go with it).

I'd very happily play a version of WoW that focused most of its attention on the goblins and their culture. It's plain to see from the brief time we get to spend in Kezan that there would be no shortage of material. There's enough conniving and backstabbing and plotting to fill dozens of storylines. You don't need external threats with a culture like theirs. 

Except this is heroic fantasy so the external threat to end all external threats turns up before you make level five. Nothing like a dragon attack to put some fire under you. Then a volcano goes off and the island sinks so that's the end of that.

It's all go but I'm not sure any of it tops the quest where you cruise around town in a convertible, picking up your crew to go party. Seriously, that's the game I want to play. I want to get to know my guys, hear their back stories, blag our way into parties and onto private yachts, make it on the scene. 

In the short time before the volcano erupted I got to drive a car, win a footbomb match, dance by the pool and get dressed up fit for a red carpet premiere. Not to mention rob a bank and blow up my own house. Nothing's going to match that. It's all downhill from there. 

I ended up comatose on a raft with nothing left but my good name. In a place that eerily reminded me of the new starting zone, Exile's Reach. Remember that first quest there, where the Murlocs have stolen a bunch of stuff and you have to go get it back? Well this is like that, only instead of Murlocs, it's monkeys.

Levels zip by all too fast in the free lane. My goblin was already level seven when I left her, sitting at the top of some stairs, staring out across the waves to where her homeland used to be. She'll be level ten by the time she gets to Orgrimmar and her life will be half-way over. 

I just hope she can find the bank.

Around And Around

If there's one thing the many the blog posts I've read on World of Warcraft's Shadowlands expansion have in common it's that they don't seem to agree on very much. I've heard people saying the open-world leveling experience is better than usual and worse than usual, that the expansion is very alt-friendly and that it doesn't really work for alts. 

Some people describe their experiences in Torghast in glowing terms, others aren't so keen. Everyone has their own idea of which covenant is best except for those who don't like any of them. Overall, some people think Blizzard have done a good job, others not so much. About the only thing everyone agrees on is no-one likes the Maw.

Can't say I'm all that surprised. It's probably a good sign. When expansions are genuinely below par the critical voices usually drown out the praise. If people are mainly disagreeing over which parts are good and which bad then the developers have probably got it about right.

It's all a bit notional for me since I'm not playing Shadowlands. Come to think of it, I seem to know a ridiculous amount about an  expansion of which I have no personal experience and not really all that much interest. That's WoW for you.

Reading all that did make me re-assess an mmoprg expansion that launched around the same time, one I am playing: EverQuest II's Reign of Shadows. In particular it got me thinking about EQII's current expansion gameplay loop, at least as it applies to solo players like myself.

The Darkpaw team does have one theoretical advantage over their counterparts at Blizzard. They knock out an expansion every year. With about a hundredth of the people and a thousandth of the resources, true, but at least they can remember what they did last time. Which is handy, because chances are they're going to do the same again.

 

Except not exactly. The level cap only goes up every other year and every expansion has to have at least one new feature to grab everyone's attention. Last year's Blood of Luclin had ten new levels and the Overseer system. It also had an unannounced, unexpected and, for many, unwelcome tradeskill revamp. Reign of Shadows keeps the same level cap but comes with a new race, the Vah Shir, and announced changes to the way both Alternate Advancement and Guilds progress.

Surprisingly little of that factors into my personal gameplay loop, which has remained remarkably consistent not only throughout the two Lunar expansions but the two Planar ones that preceded them and several more before that. Here's how it goes.

First things first. If the expansion has new levels I concentrate on getting those done, usually on my Berserker, who I grudgingly have to admit is my "main" these days. He's also a weaponsmith but far more importantly he's my Transmuter and Adorner, which means he also has crafting levels to work on. 

There's always a "Signature" questline for both adventurers and crafters. Each is usually lengthy, although the craft Sig felt a little shorter this year. The two traditionally carry the same main storyline but from differing perspectives, which makes doing both somewhat synergistic. 

I always start with the adventure quests, which until last year were designed to finish around and about the same time as you capped out. Blood of Luclin changed that, giving hugely increased xp, so last year I hit the cap long before I'd finished the questline. 

 

That made almost no difference to my motivation because as well as telling a story I find interesting, these quests provide regular upgrades. The final reward is either a weapon or a near-best-in-slot item. Something worth having, anyway. 

The rewards from the tradeskill line tend to be a bit fluffier - a lot of house and appearance items - but crafters are fluffy, by and large. Again, the final reward tends to be a very good piece that most players are likely to want. You also often need to complete at least one of the signature lines to get various character flags giving benefits like access to instances and allowing the use of flying mounts.

Blood of Luclin made a raft of changes to crafting that the majority of tradeskillers found detrimental to their enjoyment of the game, mostly for very sound reasons, but I personally liked them and even found them to be in my own best interests. This year, however, things are roughly back to normal, which is fine, too.

Once I've finished both the Signature questlines and completed all my levels, if there are any, the real expansion begins. For group and raid players that means the traditional round of progressively more challenging dungeons but for solo players like me it means a lot of single-use and repeatable quests.

Separate from the Signature quests, these days each expansion includes a load of quests that start with drops. In the distant past EQII had players learning languages and acquiring racial masteries from items mobs dropped. It still happens, but sparingly. The slack has been taken up by drops that give quests which send you around the new zones killing certain types of mob. That's one way you get more upgrades.

 

The other very important way adventurers can upgrade their gear without visiting a dungeon is to join in with the never-ending carnival of Public Quests. These vary quite a bit. Sometimes they're elaborate, with multiple stages requiring people to do different things in different places. Other times they're straightforward open raids on creatures other games might call World Bosses. Last year they happened in instances, this year they're on open maps.

Reign of Shadows must have good PQs because a couple of months after launch they're still very much the hot ticket. They're all the World Boss kind and there seem to be three in each of the new zones. If you kill all three a fourth spawns. 

Just about any time I log in there's either an open raid circling around doing them as they pop or people are calling them out and trying to get a raid started. I did four two nights ago and three last night. I could have done a lot more if I'd wanted because there's so much interest multiple instances of the zones keep spawning, leading to an almost unbroken chain.

The PQs are popular because they have drops which, while rare, are upgrades even for dungeoneers. I'm not absolutely sure but I think there may even be a few things raiders wouldn't sniff at. That keeps things busy, at least until most people get what they want, which usually takes a good portion of the twelve-month expansion cycle. 

It goes without saying that any of those good drops is going to be be a huge upgrade for a solo player like me but even the regular drops can be better than my quest gear. And there's a currency too, naturally, to spend at a special vendor. I haven't actually checked what you can get with that yet.

 

There are other soloable upgrade paths that shouldn't be ignored. EQII has a fantastic collectables system where you find and pick up "shinies" from the ground in every map and instance. Most are tradeable and the inevitable duplicates can go for big money - some of the rewards are very nice indeed.

Completed collections also come with collectables of their own, leading to meta-collections that can nest several times and provide really very good items for those with the patience or the deep pockets to acquire them all. 

Over the years the collectable system has been expanded to include No Drop shinies that can't be traded and different colored kinds that only characters who've achieved certain benchmarks or completed certain quests can see. Collecting in Norrath is serious business.

So is crafting. Last year there were many complaints about the way crafters acquired their new recipes and what they could make with them but this year things are a little more traditional. Basic recipes are purchasable from trainers and, as far as I know, the more sought-after rare recipes are still dropped by mobs (although possibly only by Bosses and then only rarely). 

The main crafting gameplay loop for me, however, is Research. Most of the new maps have a Researcher NPC who's almost the tradeskill equivalent of a Public Quest. Anyone who qualifies (usually by dint of having progressed a certain distance through the Signature questline) can take a repeatable quest from each of these NPCs several times a day. The more quests the server collectively completes, the more new recipes open up for sale on the associated vendor.

 

That's an incentive in itself but the real draw are the personal rewards you get for completing each quest. From those you can get all kinds of nice things like recipe books, mercenaries and the patterns needed to make the desirable new mastercrafted armor and weapons. They also give you the currency you need to buy things from the aforementioned vendor.

All of the Research quests involve harvesting materials and crafting items, something which melds very comfortably with the adventuring activities listed above. It feels very organic, swooping around the new maps on the mount that now flies because you finished the zone storyline, dropping out of the sky to snatch up a shiny, kill a bunch of quest mobs, harvest some materials or join in with a PQ.

In Blood of Luclin last year this loop kept me happily occupied right into the summer, interspersed as it was with the regular holidays and a couple of big updates. With the ever-popular ethereal season that seems to go on longer each year blending into the now-traditional Panda quests and then the pre-expansion events running up to next year's xpack, it's quite feasible to spend the whole year working on something or other - and that's not even considering playing other characters, of whom I have many.

The downside would be that all this activity can start to feel somewhat familiar, year on year. And, as we all know but don't like to admit, almost every gain our characters make is temporary, set to be wiped out as soon as the next content drop arrives. 

Those are very minor quibbles. The entire hobby relies on, even thrives on, these kinds of repeatable activities. And as an entertaining, satisfying, enjoyable way to spend a few hours as often as the mood takes me, I don't think the way EQII handles the loop can easily be bettered. 

I Think I'm Gonna Let My Subscription Slide

After some thought this morning, I cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft, just a day before it fell due.  I filled out the "Why don't you love me anymore?" questionnaire including the "any other reasons" section, where I ran into the five-hundred word buffer long before I'd finished explaining why it wasn't them, it was me.

Even so, I was pretty cagey. There was something about my decision-making process I wasn't sure I wanted Blizzard to know. Among the reasons I feel I can't really justify paying ten pounds a month for WoW, the main one is that I can do most of the things I enjoy in the game without paying them a penny.

I strongly prefer the low-mid level game to what comes later. I like making new characters, trying different race and class combos and generally goofing around. All of that, I can do for free. With the level squish effectively adding another twenty old-school levels to the free option as well as opening up every expansion short of Shadowlands for anyone, there's more than enough free content to keep me amused for the foreseeable future. 

I'm not sure I want to bring that to Blizzard's attention. I mean, have they noticed? I'm guessing they're now so laser-focused on the bizarro version of WoW people have to pay for that they've completely forgotten they're giving away a bigger and arguably better mmorpg than anything we used to pay for back when subscriptions were the norm.

I was so certain I'd be carrying on without the sub I even did some prep for when it lapses. I made two new characters on the Horde side, where I had no-one under forty, then I had my level fifty goblin shaman buy half a dozen thirty-slot bags and post them to the newbies along with five hundred gold pocket money each. 

 

Then I ran a few old raids on my fifty hunter to make a couple of thousand gold and sent some of that to several of my low-level Alliance characters, along with all the hexweave bags he's been making in his garrison. And of course I'd already taken the trouble to start a new garrison with my level fifteen druid, who can take over as Alliance bagmaker if I need more, which I probably won't.

Apart from the simple truth that I just haven't been using most of the parts of the game I'm paying for since the new year, one of my main motives for cancelling is to find out just how much fun WoW is under the free to play rules. On paper, there's a lot more freedom of choice, with double the levels and a huge increase in explorable content, not to mention free players can now have a thousand gold to their names.

And there's the materials vault or whatever it's called. When did they add that? I only noticed it a couple of weeks ago and the mat-packed bags of every character I've logged in since suggests I hadn't just forgotten about it... but then I logged in my gnome hunter, who hasn't been anywhere near a bank for at least a year, went to buy it for her and she already had it. But it was empty... 

No clue how that happened.

Just the massive increase to inventory space alone is going to transform the experience of playing low-level characters. Running out of space has always been a defining feature of the game until I reached a point where I could just buy my way out of it, which was never going to happen on the old version of the free trial. Now that's changed, whether it's going to make for a more enjoyable experience... well, that's what I'd like to find out.

 

I'm also interested to know whether, having made a new vulpera (They start at level ten, annoyingly.) I'll be able to play her. I've tried to research it but the information I've found has been contradictory, never a surprise when it comes to WoW. I think the allied races are excluded from those you can create as a free player, even if you've unlocked them, but whether you can play one that's already on your account is something I'll find out tomorrow.

The penultimate reason for canceling the sub is that, as must be obvious, I've decided not to buy Shadowlands just yet. I did a bit of searching and it seems I could get a key for the expansion for less than £15, which would have been exactly what I'd be willing to pay, but only if I want to play on a U.S. server. For some reason that escapes me, the cheapest EU key in the secondary market runs around £25 whereas I 've seen U.S. keys as low as £13.

I do actually have a U.S. WoW account but for irritating historical reasons I have almost all my characters on an EU one instead. I always prefer to play on American servers when I can but I really don't want to repeat my EverQuest/EverQuest II/Guild Wars 2 history by spreading my efforts across multiple accounts, let alone regions. 

The other problem with buying Shadowlands is that all I'm really interested in is the levelling part. There's a near-zero chance of my carrying on with it once I've seen all the zones and storylines. It seems nuts to pay anything like full price just for that when I still have so much of the older content to play through for free. I'll wait until I can pick up Shadowlands at a price that more closely refelects the use I'm likely to make of it.

 

The final and most pressing reason for the cancellation has nothing at all to do with WoW itself. These last couple of weeks I've barely mentioned EQII and that's because I haven't been playing it much. I even went several days without logging in at all. I'd finished the signature adventure and tradeskill questlines on my Berserker/Weaponsmith and it felt as though I was done with Reign of Shadows other than going through the same content again with another character.

Yeah, that was stupid. I knew it wasn't true, it just felt as though it might be. Last night I finally logged in and while I was setting my Overseer missions I saw someone was setting up a raid for the Wolf PQ in Savage Weald 2. I asked for an invite, got one and ported there. 

When I arrived I noticed I was standing next to an NPC with a green feather over his head. He was a researcher with one of the repeatable research quests so I took it. An hour later I'd done three public quests and got a major upgrade from one of them (celestial quality, shoulder slot). I'd also finished two research quests, one of which gave me a key recipe book for adornments which, when I make them, will give me a bunch more upgrades.

Just like that I had a whole new reason to knuckle down and get on with the expansion. I remembered how important research quests had been in Blood of Luclin a year ago and also how much I'd enjoyed doing them. And I had a ton of fun doing the PQs, which are currently a hot ticket in EQII, at least until a critical mass of people get the drops they want.

I took a moment to consider whether I'd rather be spending my time in WoW or EQII. The answer was obvious. I've been looking for an mmorpg to sink my teeth into and there it was, right in front of me all the time. Back to Norrath it is.

For a while, anyway.

Cruel Garrison

Time for a very quick update on what I've been up to in World of Warcraft. Dithering, mostly. My monthly subscription falls due in five days and I haven't yet decided whether to cancel. 

I re-subbed back in October with the intention of checking out the Shadowlands pre-patch, the level squish, Chromie Time and the new tutorial zone, Exile's Reach. I did all of those, wrote a bunch of posts about it and generally had a pretty good time. 

The plan had also been to open up access to the Vulpera allied race, make a fox and level that character to the cap but what with one thing and another I ended up levelling a goblin shaman first, all the way from character creation to the pre-Shadowlands level cap of fifty, something I definitely hadn't expected to find myself doing. After that I didn't quite have the determination to push the fox to fifty, mostly because the EverQuest II expansion arrived when she was about ten levels shy.

When Reign of Shadows appeared in early December I didn't stop playing WoW altogether but my hours dropped to a bare minimum. I was still logging in but almost entirely to keep my ricketty garrison working on hexweave bags. 

 

Even so, that took more time than I expected. I'd imagined it would be like EverQuest's Overseer, just a few clicks on the UI each day, but it seems Blizzard intended something a lot more hands-on. Making bags required me to keep my tailor supplied with sumptuous furs, while upgrading just the few buildings I needed to get the operation up and running cost gold I didn't have. 

I found myself out hunting wolves and cat-people for their fur for an hour or so almost every other day and making repeated forays into old raid instances to make money. For the last two months I've played WoW every day and while I've been there, that's all I've done. 

At first it was fun. Then it became a habit. Now it's starting to feel like a chore. I guess it's the WoD experience in microcosm. And I'm beginning to realize it's also all been a bit... pointless.

First I noticed that hexweave bags can reliably be bought for between 250g and 300g on my server. Using my garrison I can make a bag every other day or so for free but I can make enough gold to buy three or four bags in just the time it would take me to gather the fur. 

It's more satisfying to make them, in theory, but that satisfaction wears off after the first half-dozen or so. I'm at the point now where I feel I might as well just do a bunch of old raids once a week and buy my bags.

 

More significantly, I realized eventually that having an Alliance character with a garrison isn't going to help my Horde characters with their inventory issues. Blizzard take their faction split a lot more seriously than most other developers. Since one of the main reasons I was doing this in the first place was to put thirty slot bags on my Vulpera hunter I clearly didn't think it through.

Of course, I have Horde characters who could build garrisons of their own. And that sounded like a fairly attractive option until I realized something else. Garrisons are unique to the character that quests for them, not the account or even the faction on that account. 

Since my end-game here is to be capable of supplying big bags on demand to any new characters I make and play under the free-to-play rules after I cancel my subscription, what I should have done was send one Alliance and one Horde character, under level twenty, to start a garrison and then be very careful not to let them level too far to be able to keep using it. 

I'd already confirmed on my other free account that you don't need to subscribe to have a garrison and that under the new levelling rules you can get the quest at level ten. Today I spent half an hour getting my level fifteen druid from Stormwind to Shadowmoon Valley just to make absolutely sure she couldn't use the garrison I already had. I've found that no matter what online guides tell you about WoW you never really know for sure until you test it in game.

 

This time I could have saved myself the swim. She couldn't even see the damn thing. It exists in some other plane of reality, apparently. I spent the next half hour porting back to talk to Chromie then heading back to Shadowmoon to get the necessary quests.

That was just for proof of concept. I'd have to do the same again with a horde character and then I'd have to level up the garrisons and the necessary buildings and keep farming the furs and I'd have to fund all of that with characters in their teens. It makes absolutely no sense and I'm not going to do it.

A better plan might be to use the remaining five days of my sub to make enough gold with my Horde and Alliance level fifty characters to buy enough hexweave bags for everyone. That would be far, far easier and an ideal project for keeping my hands busy while I listen to the second England-Sri Lanka Test Match.

That's sorted then. Grind some gold, buy some bags, cancel the sub, go back to playing for free. Only...

I've been wondering whether I ought to buy Shadowlands. I've read a lot about it and it sounds pretty good for someone who enjoys levelling. I'd probably get a month or two's solid entertainment out of it and it's looking likely I'll be at home for about that long before I get the call to go back to work.

So, I'm dithering, as I said. Shadowlands is tempting but I haven't really finished with Reign of Shadows yet. It would make more sense to concentrate on finishing one expansion before I start on another. 

Or I could just let the sub roll on for another month and decide later. That's how they get you, isn't it? 

Well, it's how they get me, anyway.

Down The Mountain

While everyone else is out there exploring Shadowlands I'm still plugging away in WoW-as-was. Truth be told, I haven't even been doing all that much of that, what with my return to work and all these unexpected alphas that keep popping up. 

Plus, thanks to Jeromai pointing me towards Steam's sale on the Blackwood Chronicles, I've been playing through those as well. And to top it all off, World vs World in Guild Wars 2 has been exceptionally lively of late, meaning I've spent quite a few hours defending keeps or tearing around in a big gang, setting people on fire.

Over the last couple of nights I finally got around to playing some World of Warcraft again. I'm still subbed so it seems rude not to. I was determined to complete the Mount Hyjal story-line on my vulpera hunter and I was hoping she'd ding forty doing it. That did happen but it was hard going towards the end. 

In the high thirties quests that had once bitten a big chunk out of the experience bar barely nibbled at it. Killing mobs, even with rested xp, hardly registered. Level thirty-nine took me something close to three hours. But, hey, at least I made next to no money doing it and got even fewer upgrades!

Partly it was stubbornness that kept me at it. I'd said I was going to do it so I did it. Partly it was something simple I didn't have to think about after a long and tiring day at work. Partly it was wanting to see how the story turned out.

 

Ah, the story. Asmiroth was considering the way every game seems to focus on plot these days. I guess WoW has always had a more overt reliance on plot than most mmorpgs. There's an argument to be made, although probably not a very good one (BioWare would certainly give you a fight over it) that WoW was the game that brought narrative to the fore in the genre, turning stories into architectonics that carry much of the weight.

And when that works, it can be satisfying. It's not long ago I was talking up the virtues of the plot in Vol'dun, for example, not to mention the whole of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, as much as I've seen of it so far.

Mount Hyjal, though, does not have a particularly compelling narrative. It feels quite by the numbers. I'm fairly sure I've done this whole "wake the demi-gods and get them to help us in our war of survival" routine in several games before. 

A tale doesn't have to be original to be worth the telling, of course. Much of the pleasure is in the way you tell it. Unfortunately, whoever was telling this one didn't seem to have much of a knack for holding an audience. My mind kept wandering.

The best part was probably the chapter where you have to work your way up through the ranks of the Twilight Hammer cult. That was good for a few laughs. Other than that, there were a few individual quests I quite enjoyed while I was doing them, although now I come to try and recall what they might have been I find myself coming up empty on details.

Playing through the final chapter solo felt a bit off, too. I'm guessing back when Cataclysm was the current expansion, much of this was group content. It certainly feels as though it should be. There are several would-be climactic confrontations with supposedly powerful enemies but without exception they're resolved either by some gimmick ability gifted to you through a series of simple prep quests or through the help and intervention of NPCs much more powerful than you.

 

Maybe that's how it always was. Certainly that's how a lot of mmorpgs roll these days. And I can't pretend I don't prefer it that way. Unlike Tipa, I'm generally happier soloing than grouping these days. It's more relaxing and a lot less hassle, both practically and emotionally.

I can't pretend it's more exciting, though. Or more dramatic. It's the difference between watching a movie at home, in bed, on my Kindle Fire and going out to see a film at the cinema with a friend. Not that I'm likely to be doing that for a while. The latter is much more of an event, much more memorable, a deeper experience in just about any way you care to measure. The former, though, is easier, more convenient, and in most ways that matter, equally entertaining. Also, I find it easier to follow the narrative that way, more often than not.

Even if I'm not making much of an effort, though, I would still like the story to be worth my time. I can't say Mount Hyjal was. But... it's done now. So what next? And where next?

It is time to move on. With almost comic timing my vulpera hunter handed in her final quest to complete the last of the nine chapters in the zone story and earn herself the Coming Down the Mountain achievement, only to find herself one per cent short of the level.

All that was left was a breadcrumb quest taking her into the Firelands. She did that and ding! Forty!

And everything in Firelands was grey to her. Which was just as well, because I was already in two minds about whether I wanted to carry on there. I don't entirely know what the Firelands is (are?) but I'm guessing it was some kind of post-expansion update intended to give people something to do while the two years passed before another expansion came along.

I could look it up but honestly I've seen enough lava lakes and fire elementals for a while. I'm happy to have a good reason to move on. The question is, to where?

 

At forty I seem to have out-leveled most of the known world and certainly all of Cataclysm. I can either do some Legion or Battle for Azeroth zones or I could visit Chromie and pick one of the earlier timelines. 

I'd like to do more in Cataclysm but I think I'd rather do it on another character without Chromie's help. I could also do with making some money and gold seems to come far more easily the more recent the expansion. When Blizzard added scaling for experience, gear and mob difficulty I'm not convinced they paid all that much attention to the cash value of drops.

I need to make up my mind, though. If the vulpera is going to make it to fifty, this might be a good week for her to do it. Next week sees the arrival of the new EverQuest II expansion as well as both EQII's Frostfell and GW2's Wintersday events. Add that to the busiest time of the year at work and I doubt WoW's going to get much of a look-in.

It might even be time to cancel the subscription. Maybe I'll pick it up again when I have time to give Shadowlands a run. It does sound interesting from all the reports I'm reading. 

And if I leave it long enough I can write about leveling up in that expansion way after everyone else has finished. If you find a gimmick that works, stick with it. That's what I say!

Fire On The Mountain

Everyone else is out there, venturing into the lands of the dead and here am I, plodding through pre-Shadowlands WoW. Not even the cool, new Chromie-time WoW, either. Just plain old no-one likes me I'm the worst expansion ever Cataclysm.

Only I do kind of like it. I finished the whole of the zone storyline in Eastern and Western Plaguelands and thought it was pretty good. That popped me over the limit for most of the expansion but there were a handful of zones that went another five levels so I picked one of those and on I went.

Which is how I ended up spending the last couple of days in Mount Hyjal. WoWHead calls it "the zone most players quest in when starting Cataclysm zones". Yeah, I wouldn't have used the word "zone" twice in one sentence there. Also, a little confused as to how they'd have started in Mt. Hyjal when Cataclysm was new. There was no level-scaling back then, right? Wouldn't it have been high-level? 

Who knows? Ancient history. Whatever. Add it to the pile of things I don't understand about how WoW works. It's a big pile.

I had vaguely heard of Mount Hyjal before but I had no idea where or what it was. I do now, having spent something like ten hours there, and I can't say it's anywhere I'm keen to see again, once I get the hell out. Half of it's on fire and the rest is so undifferentiated and bland you can only imagine being on fire would be an improvement.

The zone storyline is equally uninspired and derivative. It has none of the personality or, indeed, personalities that made the Plaguelands such a pleasure. It's all druids and nature and elemental forces and demons and blah blah blah. How many times are we going to do this dance? Seriously?

I'm tough but I'm fair.

 

That sounds like I hated it. I didn't. It's perfectly fine, in the usage I was decrying the other day. The narrative at least makes sense although the structure is a little unstable. As far as I can tell you can be at the end while still not having done all of the middle but I don't think it matters all that much. 

Also, could we get a moratorium on NPCs giving dire warnings about urgency when in practice you can take all the time you want and it's going to make no difference whatsoever. I mean, I really dislike quests and events with timers but if you say the clock's ticking and it's not it feels even worse.

And anyway, how bad can things be if we're taking time out to save bunnies? About the only memorable NPC in the whole timeline is the self-aware, passive-aggressive, emotionally manipulative, centaur, Mylune. She literally hugs bunnies and makes doe eyes at you if you don't want to join in.

She has a couple of quests, one of which involves catching hyperactive, terrified rabbits and squirrels in a box, the other rescuing injured baby deer. Someone was very clearly having altogether too much fun when they wrote Mylune's lines,a  few of which made me laugh out loud. Fun at whose expense, though? That's the question.

I don't want to question your priorities, but...

I'm guessing Mylune, whose first appearance this is, was a bit of a favorite at the time, either with players or developers, because I see she turns up again in every succeeding expansion. Maybe she's in Shadowlands, too, although I guess she'd have to be dead, which might not quite fit the mood.

Other than that, I couldn't tell you the name of another NPC, even though it's only been a day or two. There was an archdruid who got burned to a crisp. I remember him. He looked like a bear. Well, he looked like a charred black lump but that was after. And there was big turtle who talked in free verse. Other than that I'm blanking.

Oh, wait, there was that snarky guy on the hook! He was fun. They should have given him more screen-time. And the mortal-turned-demon who played us in the most predictable scam ever. He was... well, okay, he was straight from central casting but at least I can remember him. 

Tell me how you really feel, Kristoff.

If the plot wasn't up to much the mechanics did their best to make up for it. There was a fair bit of turning into things which, as has been discussed here before, is something I generally disapprove of but I have to say WoW probably does it better than most. If I'm going to have to turn into a giant owl and fly around blowing a whistle or climb up trees and throw bear cubs into a net I'd rather do it with one simple button to press and the UI doing all the heavy lifting.

I forget exactly what level my vulpera hunter was when she arrived in Mount Hyjal. Thirty-four? Thirty-five? With just one final part of the zone storyline left to complete she's now thirty-nine. I'm hoping to limp her on to forty before we leave but I'm not sure there's quite enough questing left in the tank. 

Still, it's pretty good going. The mobs stopped scaling at thirty five but I can't say I've noticed much of a difference. They don't seem to die any faster than they did a few levels ago. The quest rewards are still mostly upgrades although that's often because of the random roll mechanic. It seems to fire more often than you'd expect, bumping close to half of everything I get by a quality level. Sometimes two.

Wait, so you're saying all that stuff you got me to do that was supposed to help the cause was just to break your bonds and set you free? Wow! I never saw that coming...

 

Xp, though, that's very much beginning to fall behind. Even thought there are other 30-35 zones in Cataclysm, I won't be trying to stretch this experiment any further. I haven't decided yet whether to move to another expansion or go back and have Chromie re-fit the Cataclysmic world to my requirements. 

I'm tempted to move on, partly because I can see doing all of the Cataclysm zones on different characters, but also for the money. The biggest practical difference I've noticed between levelling in older expansions as opposed to newer ones is the amount of gold I make. 

By the time my shaman hit fifty she had around six thousand gold and that was after spending a couple of thousand along the way. She made pretty much all of it in Battle for Azeroth's Vol'Dun, which is, ironically, the vulpera's homeland. By contrast, as she nears forty, the vulpera hunter has barely a thousand gold to her name. I'm thinking maybe it's time for her to go visit the folks for a while or at least do some adventuring closer to home.

I'm feeling kinda woozy. Y'don't think it could be these flowerzzzz....

 

One thing's for sure: in WoW Retail this time around, I've rediscovered my love of levelling for it's own sake. I'm having a great time bringing these characters up through the ranks but I have no clue what to do with any of them when they hit fifty. They're pretty much going straight onto the bench to sit things out while the next up takes a turn. Which is exactly how I played mmorpgs for years.

The exception is the dwarf hunter. He has a garrison to run. He comes out once or twice a day to set missions and check everything's running smoothly. I can already see why this was a feature loved by some and hated by many (or was that the other way around?). Even in its eviscerated state it's demanding. When it was current content it must have bordered on the oppressive.

The main reason I'm sticlking with it is I hear you can make bags. It seems you need to be a tailor to do it. So far I've worked out how to farm the fur and make the cloth. That much I managed by trial and error but I suspect the next stage will require research. 

I'm off to do that now. Expect more redundant news on outdated content no-one cares about any more - as it happens!